Addiction: I can not save you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NZsCYOM4j0&ab_channel=StabbingWestwardVEVO

News of the day (before we get into the shit).

Turkey On Verge Of Currency Collapse As Lira Implodes, Crashes 4% In Minutes

While there was no immediate catalyst for today's drop - the lira only dropped below below 10 vs the dollar for the first time ever last Friday - traders are dreading this Thursday's central bank meeting at which policymakers are expected to cut interest rates further even as Turkish inflation tops 20%.

Yikes

This one was of particular interest to me because my witness partner Deathwing is located in Turkey. Good thing he's in crypto, eh?

WOW

wow wow wow wow wow This is great for everyone.
It's literally called crypto.com... lol Good for all crypto in general.
We're taking over the world one stadium at a time, bois.

So I was planning an writing a fluff piece here about my pointless addiction to caffeine. I just keep drinking more and more for no reason. I get that itch for a cup of coffee, but I don't actually need it. It doesn't help me wake up. It doesn't help me focus. I'm probably rotting my teeth with the acidity, and yet I keep doing it.

I've quit drinking caffeine several times cold turkey and it was not difficult. I do not get withdrawals or headaches. It's just a simple matter of ignoring the cravings for a couple days. Soon™. I think I was saying that a year ago as well. Now I'm drinking like 2 pots of coffee a day (~5 cups). Ew.

But then yesterday happened...

And yesterday shit got real, because yesterday my girlfriend came home on her lunchbreak (which almost never happens), but this time she was crying... she had just gotten the call: her brother was dead.

Now this is something that we prepped for months ago when he was a full on drug addict in denial, but the last time we saw him (before we moved from CA to PA in September) he was doing pretty well, taking his recovery quite seriously (more seriously than the full time job that it was). He seemed like he was on the road to recovery.

Word on the street is that he was at the halfway house acting shady so he was forced to take a drug test, which he failed. He'd be allowed to stay at the house one more day but then he'd have to go back to rehab or simply find someplace else to say. We were told he seemed to accept this fate and didn't seem suicidal or anything like that.

However many hours later he was found not breathing and unresponsive. Resuscitation failed and he was declared dead on the scene. Later we were told it was a Fentanyl overdose. Opioids and pain killers have always been his primary blackhole.

This comes as a shock but is simultaneously not surprising. He has had more than enough near-death experiences over the course of his life, including a car accident over a year ago with revealed the true extent of the drug use that was previously hidden. He dropped off the grid back then, refusing to go to rehab, so we were expecting the call much sooner than we got it if we're being honest. It just came down the pipe at the least expected time. The last time I saw him we were at dinner and he told a stranger (friend of my girlfriend) that he was a recovering drug addict when we were sharing stories about our jobs. Very committed to the program.

Addiction's fishtail

I think it's quite likely that after being clean for so long combined with the depression of having somewhat failed in his quest for rehabilitation, he took too much Fentanyl without realizing that his tolerance for the stuff was right around zero percent. Combine that with the Fentanyl possibly being a little dirty and laced with some other bullshit creates an easy recipe for overdose.

He died on his 8 month anniversary of being sober. This is pretty common: for addicts to relapse on an anniversary. Overcoming addiction is so difficult they'll often do an anniversary every month as a tribute to the discipline it requires to avoid the cravings. Most of the time these tokens are worn with a badge of honor, but like I said this is a double-edged sword and can backfire into relapse.

I really have to wonder if he would still be alive today if he simply wasn't caught doing drugs, or if the halfway house had another option of dealing with the problem short of kicking him out. Alas, playing the what-if game is a trap. What's done is done.

The artificial corrupted world we've built around us is largely to blame for tragedies like this. Addiction is not a disease. Society is the disease and addiction is simply a symptom of it. We are told that if our mental state does not comply with capitalism and economic efficiency then we must have a metal disorder, when in reality it is society itself that is sick beyond compare.

Addiction is a coping mechanism gone wrong; a short-term solution to a problem that never goes away, and thus the addiction never goes away. Usually it is fueled by high doses of depression and hopelessness.

There's really a lot to be said here. My worst addiction has been video games, which isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things, until you add in on the pot I was smoking in order to make 16 hours of video games a day not boring as the time melted off the clock year after year. World of Warcraft players measure their time played in days (24 hour blocks) instead of hours. I was well above 500 days played (more than two years playing straight 16 hour days). I'm also a master league Starcraft 2 player and have spent thousands of hours on other games as well.

But it feels so self-centered to talk about me at a time like this. This is a time where I feel like I'm in an extremely lucky position and everyone else is just downright fucked for the next ten years. It's a weird place to find myself, to be sure. By all accounts I should have been in line with all the rest of the peasants, but my clawing and scraping on Hive has very much paid off. How insanely lucky is that?

My girlfriend only took a half-day off from work in the wake of this tragedy. She's over there right now, tinkering away in autoCAD for a construction company.

He is survived by his two sisters and two children. Again, I can't help but think that I'm middle aged now and my dad is still alive, but these 10 and 14 year olds have basically just lost their hero. #feelsbadman

Origin story

How did this happen? Well he's a bit of a daredevil. Skateboarding and snowboarding for the most part from what I've seen. He got injured once and started taking painkillers, but I believe the injury and the pain were largely permanent in some respects. One opioid addiction later he had been dealing with this stuff for over a decade, most of the time in complete secrecy. Only within the last couple years did the situation truly escalate to red-alert danger-zone levels.

These things happen.

But they really don't need to happen nearly as often. I hope that we can build something here that exposes the old way of doing things for what is really is: a complete scam that's constantly gaslighting everyone in the name of capitalism and profits.

Requiem for a dream.

For me, crypto has never been about money. It's always been about completely changing the very fabric of society and removing as much as the corruption and rot as possible... and by God, is there a lot of corruption and rot in every direction we look.

We need our communities back. We need our support systems back. We need our ownership of production and society itself back. We can no longer outsource such important powers to fallible leaders that will constantly disappoint us. This is the way, and it's not going to be easy.

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